Mealime wins again.  I ate a meal where beans played a starring role, and much to my surprise I wouldn’t mind eating the meal again!  Their Southwestern Black Bean Cakes were good, especially when slathered with guacamole.  The leftover portion is freezing now, and I’ll be glad to have this on hand the next time I have a spare avocado.  It’s doubtlessly better for me than a bag of tortilla chips.

I did tweak the recipe slightly and added three strips of bacon.  While the addition invalidated the whole “vegetarian” concept, knowing there was bacon in the dish made it easier for me to take a bite.  The next time I make this I’ll go full throttle and skip the bacon.

Beans have been a nemesis food for a long time.  They’re on my Top Ten Foods I’m Most Afraid Of Eating list.  I made the list several years ago when I started trying to transform my eating habits.  I’ve made some headway.  The foods in italics are foods I’ll now eat without much of a fuss.

Top Ten Foods I’m Most Afraid Of Eating

1. Spinach
2. Beans (including humus, tofu, etc.)
3. Mushrooms
4. Cantaloupe
5. Kale
6. Broccoli
7. Bananas
8. Olives
9. Asparagus
10. Sea vegetables

Obviously I still have work to do, but I’m a step closer to liking beans.  It’s progress.  I’m moving in the right direction, even if my waistline doesn’t yet illustrate that point.

Ten years ago I wrote every day.  I had a public blog, a private diary, and a work journal.  I wrote about my house, my lack of a love life, my career, and my family.  Sometimes, like the monkeys with typewriters, I churned out something interesting; but usually I wrote crap no one could ever care about.  It seemed like it would never end.  The words were always there, writhing beneath my skin, begging me to pound the keyboard and let it all out.

Today I seldom write.  I do have short bursts of intense writing, like the one I’m doubtlessly experiencing now (Or like the one that persuaded me to buy yet another domain name and start this blog, for crying out loud!) but today it isn’t uncommon for me to go weeks without writing.

I thought maybe I wrote less because I’m older.  I thought I was less willing to risk myself emotionally.  Maybe I’m smarter, and I’ve (finally!) learned from the occasions where I’ve written myself into trouble.

Those are the lies I’ve been telling myself.

Today, though, I realized for me writing is an expression of hope.  I write about the person I want to become, the plans I have for the future, and about things in my life that are exciting and interesting.

I’m not hopeful any longer.*

My career seems to have flatlined.  My only social contacts are my family, who live three hours away. Love is sawdust. I have no energy. I’m in debt.  And I’m still fat.

I’m ashamed of the sad little life I’m living, and I don’t find much joy in anything I do.

No wonder I don’t write.

But what if I could change my life by writing again?  If I put myself under a microscope again will I re-learn how to be interesting?

Habitfork is about the choices I make and the habits I establish.  Investing in my happiness by changing my (non) writing habit seems like something I have to do.  After all, if I won’t blog, why own a domain?

* Except I am going on vacation soon, which makes me happy.  Then again, escaping my daily life is about avoidance, not about hope.  So no, vacation-generated excitement doesn’t count.

Today, as part of my ongoing not-happy-with-my-life streak, I took a depression inventory and didn’t do so well.  It asked all kinds of fun questions, like how many times have I felt excited in the last two weeks?  And do I like myself?  Am I ashamed of myself?

(Huge heavy sigh)  I have to keep reminding myself that it isn’t as bad as all that.  I’m not happy, sure, but things could be a whole lot worse.  I had a tiny bump in pay today, for instance, which made me happy for all of an hour.  Now I can afford my phone bill!

But overall, despite the raise I am very grateful for, the afternoon was a suck-filled hollow of despair.

When I made it home this evening I decided I needed to think about strategy again and come up with a new-improved-plan!!!! to make everything work now and make me a happier person in the process.  Or as happy as possible, because face it, my set point is pretty low.

As part of the strategy session, I stepped on a scale for the first time since April.  I’ve been dreading the scale.  I’m fat, I eat pizza every week, I’m not healthy, I’ve broken my diet a million times, I ate chocolate today, I ate cheese crackers today, I hate myself.  I feel heavier every day, and when I looked in the mirror the fat on my belly was obviously hanging a good two inches lower than it was in the spring.  If I had to guess I’d think I weigh about 320 pounds.  More than I’ve weighed in ages.  All this depression isn’t helping weight loss.  I’m thinking all this, watching the scale fluctuate.  Up ten pounds, down twelve, up seven  . . . and it settled on 285.

I haven’t weighed this little since 2007.

I don’t know what to think.  I don’t know what I did right, because it feels like everything I’m doing is wrong.  I should be celebrating, but I don’t have it in me to make the jump from despair to triumph.  Instead, I’m stuck crying and trying to smile at the same time.  My face must have the most horrible grimace on it.

I don’t know where to go from here.  Somebody tell me what my next move is, please?

I’ve cooked from subscription boxes for several months, and I’ve enjoyed the experience, but it’s time to move on.

Subscription boxes helped me overcome my fear of new foods.  This fear was the Number One Reason for using subscription boxes, and I’ve been more successful than I thought possible when I started this endeavor.

The boxes also helped me make the jump from restaurants to home cooking by removing my personal Scylla and Charybdis, meal planning and shopping.  Removing those barriers moved me several steps closer to the kitchen, and I’m grateful to HomeChef and Plated for making that happen.

I’d like to continue using subscription boxes, but the meals are not budget-friendly.  I want to stress the meals are reasonably priced considering the services provided.  Each meal costs about what I’d pay for a meal at a chain restaurant in Texas.  The problem is that I can’t afford restaurant prices for six meals a week.

While I need to move away from subscription boxes, I don’t yet feel ready to control my own menu.  I still need support, which is why I’m moving to a meal planning service.

With a meal planning service, I get recipes and a shopping list.  I’ll have to go to the store, but I won’t have to decide what to eat.  (This is important because if left to my own devices I’d load the cart with popcorn and cupcakes.)

After researching several meal planning services, I settled on Mealime.com.  Mealime met my short list of requirements:

• Vegetarian (and pescatarian) meals.
• Tools to scale the recipes down to two servings.  (I’d still rather have ONE serving, but I’ll take what I can get.)
• An app with a shopping list.  Why should I waste my time copying everything to my phone, or messing with a printer?  Those are potential roadblocks.)
• A focus on meals that can be cooked quickly.
• An effort at zero-waste meals.  For example, if the service asks me to purchase a bunch of cilantro, one recipe may use half the bunch and another recipe will use the remainder.

I’m a little anxious.  I’m not sure I’ll like the meals, and I’m worried the app won’t meet my admittedly picky standards.  The alternative, however — complete mealtime freedom — is worse.  I’m not ready for that responsibility.

We’ll have to see how this goes.

The diet hasn’t been so great lately.

The largest roadblock I face continues to be my twice-a-month weekend road trips to Dallas.  Even though I make plans to cope with food on my return, the plans rarely reach fruition. When I make it back home I’m too tired to shop and too tired to cook, so I start the work week off with breakfast at McDonald’s.  It goes downhill from there.  I’m usually able to put myself back together by Wednesday night, but that’s FOUR DAYS of bad eating behind me.  (Weekend + Monday + Tuesday.)

I thought I had a solution for this — a new job in Dallas — but it’s past time for the committee to make a decision, so it looks like my interview wasn’t successful.  It’s the dream job, the kind of job I left teaching to get, but the committee must have liked another candidate else better.

I did everything I could to prep.  I couldn’t sleep for two nights before the interview due to presentation prepping and nerves, so I went in with three hours sleep (for two nights running) and still performed well, until I started losing steam in the last interview of a day-long interview. Or maybe my perceptions were off due to sleep deprivation. It doesn’t really matter at this stage, does it?  Over is over.

Hm.  I just realized I forgot to send a thank-you note for the interview.  It would probably look desperate at this stage.  I’ll wait a few weeks, until I’m sure I’ve failed, then send one out.

On the positive side, I haven’t gone into a depressing eat-everything tailspin over this failure.  I ate half a chocolate bar today, but I would probably have eaten it anyway.  (Chilis and cherries!!)

This could all be much worse.  I’m not miserable where I am.  I like the town, I like my office-mates.  I’m getting to do a lot of technically challenging things.  I’m just bored, and I feel isolated.  It’s like 50% of my skill sets are going to waste.  And this school is huge, conservative and tradition-laden, with tons of red tape and fiefdoms!  I don’t have the energy to innovate in this climate.

I would have been so good at that job! But I’m not the only one who would be good at it.

I am not going to Dairy Queen.  There are no Blizzards in my future.

The slip

I hate myself.  More accurately I hate what I’ve allowed myself to eat this week. Eating healthy is supposed to be the most important thing in my life, and I’ve failed miserably.  All that’s left to love are the runner-up priorities that don’t matter.  So there isn’t much to love, excepting almost 300 pounds of blubber, which no could love.

It’s been a horrible week, filled with Dr. Pepper, cheese crackers, chocolate, Whataburger, Long John Silver’s, McDonald’s and Fazoli’s. I should have been eating the six servings of vegetarian subscription box meals in my fridge, but NOOOOO.  Instead, I ate crap.  And to make the situation even worse, tomorrow six more subscription box servings arrive.

The meals I have on hand are probably going bad, so I’ll have to toss them.  Not only can I not make good choices, I also keep wasting money.  Those six servings cost me $72.00.

So yeah, I’m not happy with myself.

Next steps?

The Internet’s best advice says self-loathing isn’t productive.  It’s likely to make me feel worse, which in my case usually equals more poor food choices.  I need to know what triggered this, and then take steps so I can interrupt the cycle in the future.  If I have a plan, I’m more likely to let the self-loathing abate.  If my plan works, then I will hopefully use the plan in response to the triggers, instead of using the drive-thru lanes.

So what went wrong?

My triggers are Dr. Pepper-related, professional and podiatric.

All the Dr. Pepper I’ve been consuming makes it difficult to sleep at night, so I’ve been averaging four hours a night for over a week now.  It’s hard to make good decisions when fatigued.  I’m going through cycles of AWAKE AWAKE and asleep asleep.  I keep saying NO MORE DR. PEPPER, but then remember I’m out of ice at home, so when I hit the drive-thru I buy one.

HigherEdJobs had a posting I’m very interested in, which meant I had to update my vita, references, and salary history.   Worse yet, I had to update my professional portfolio, which hasn’t received any love since 2008.  It needed to have social sharing, a new theme, and new content. It also needed to be mobile, and (of course) Section 508 compliant.  I spent most of last week working furiously to make all of that happen.

This week is also the last week of class, so I’m dealing with my students and final exams.  And since my faculty Subject Matter Experts are about to scatter for the summer they’ve been working furiously, trying to give me enough content to keep me busy with development until they return in the fall.

And my feet . . . OMG, my feet.  I’ve injured one foot somehow, and it’s super-sore, especially when I’m trying to (fitfully) sleep.  This week has also involved a lot of standing on the job.  It’s hard to force myself to cook when standing upright in the kitchen is painful.

Lessons learned

I need better food options in place for times when my life gets out of control.  The lesson isn’t anything new.  This knowledge has plagued me for years, but I’ve never had a satisfactory resolution, except maybe to drive through Panera Bread instead of Whataburger.

The new plan

I think my salvation might be in those meals I haven’t cooked.  Those meals need to become the foundation for an enormous batch of freezer meals.  Cooking all this food won’t be easy.  I don’t know if I have enough stamina to prepare all the meals before they go bad.  The alternatives, however — wasting food and money, and gaining more weight from fast food — isn’t acceptable.

I also need to QUIT DRINKING DR. PEPPER.  I need to buy ice trays and use them.  Dealing with the trays is a pain, but I need a solution I can control with minimal effort.  It takes less effort to fill a tray than make a grocery store run.

Other needs

Waking up in time to cook breakfast is an issue, too, but I’ll deal with that later.  I’m problemed out.

In the Hated Vegetable series, I’ll focus on preparing meals that contain foods I hate.  Or, foods I think I hate.

Tonight I ate more presumably gross food.  Plated sent me Salsify, Pea, and Sweet Onion Gruyere Paninis with Frisee Salad.  Did you read that?  Peas.  On a sandwich.  WTF? Wouldn’t they roll off the sandwich?  Isn’t that weird?

And who ever thought of eating peas, anyway?  Who said “Hey, let’s take these little green things that look like congealed snot and and put them in our mouth.  Bet they’re delicious!”  Who is the freak who first ate peas?

Then Plated tries to make the meal even more gross by adding cooked spinach. Please remember a few weeks ago just the thought of eating spinach forced me spit out a mouth full of food. Spinach wins the title of Second Grossest-Looking Everyday Food EVER, barely beaten out by Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats that have set in milk so long they unravel.  (I swear my sisters would leave theirs in the milk on purpose.)

The meal also included a tree-branch-looking thing called a “salsify.”  It sounds like salsa, but is no relation.  I’m disappointed, but chop it up per the recipe instructions.

On the plus side the meal did involve bread, cheese and caramelized onion.  On the strength of these three ingredients I decided I could choke down the panini, so put my fingers in my ears, ignored the Pizza Hut commercials playing incessantly on TV and cooked.  (It’s very hard to cook with fingers in your ears, and probably unsanitary, but I managed.)

Did you know salsify is sticky?  Maybe it’s salsify sap? I had to use Goo Gone to get it off my hands.  Once again Plated leaves out information I would have liked to have known in advance, so I could avoid digging through a cabinet with sticky hands, stick-ifying everything I touched.

Plated didn’t send enough cheese.  No way I could get through this experience without LOTS of cheese to disguise the vegetables.  I used half the cheese belonging to the uncooked serving, but hey — it’s not like I’d be cooking this hot mess again, right?

Except finished sandwich unexpectedly looked . . . delicious.  The peas weren’t rolling sickly around the plate, and the spinach wasn’t all gross and protruding out from under the bread.  On the contrary, it toasted beautifully and smelt really amazing. But hey, smell is overrated.  I’m not going to be fooled by a little aroma.  This sandwich had too many gross-me-out-things on it to ever be a success.

I ate the first bite standing by the trash can. My phone was on the counter beside me, with the Pizza Hut app at the ready.  I closed my eyes, brought the sandwich up to my face, screwed up my nose and took a bite.  I know the green grossness would hit at any second.  I was ready for the veggie slime to spoil the meal.  I chewed.  And chewed.  And swallowed in amazement.

Plated triumphs again.  Another weird-assed meal with gross vegetables, and I enjoyed every bite.  I’m still in shock.  Tomorrow morning I’m buying more cheese so I can cook the other sandwich for lunch.

But in the long term?  It’s good.  I enjoyed it.  But this isn’t going into my recipe collection, mainly because it uses bread.  Since I’m single I rarely buy bread.  The loaf always goes bad before I can finish it, even the so-called small loaves.  Molded bread makes me feel lonely, so I won’t be cooking this again.  Thank you, Plated, but ultimately no thanks.

Beans, please remember, are not a favorite food.  They’re mushy, and I detest mushy.  About the only mushy food I like is ice cream.  And I’ll bypass ice cream for a box of cheddar cheese crackers any day that ends in “y.”

This week’s meals from Plated.com were . . . challenging. That’s a good adverb.  We’re being positive here, right? We’re inviting change. So it’s a GOOD THING that the recipes used mushy chickpeas. I am getting better at eating mush, too. I am evolving, my tastes are changing, and I can eat mush.

Hmmm . . . I have a mantra.  Didn’t even know I needed one.

I am evolving, my tastes are changing, and I can eat mush.
I am evolving, my tastes are changing, and I can eat mush.
I am evolving, my tastes are changing, and I can eat mush.
I am evolving, my tastes are changing, and I can eat mush.

(I’ll give you a moment of silence to fret over my . . . I’m not sure what my condition is . . . and then we’ll move on to the food.)

The first recipe from Plated, Crispy Roasted White Beans with Sorrel, Sumac, Feta, and Yogurt Sauce, sounded good thanks to the word “crispy.”  The recipe asked me to roast the chickpeas at 450 degrees for 8 – 9 minutes.  When I took them out of the oven they were still mushy, so I stuck them back in for another three minutes while the poor sorrel wilted on the burner.  Since I was starving I served up mushy beans with wilted sorrel, and called it done.

Much to my surprise the sorrel was the most difficult part of the meal.  I was enjoying it, honestly, until I thought about how much it looked like cooked spinach.  My gag reflex unexpectedly took over, and I had to rush to the trash can to spit out the mush in my mouth.

I’m going to try this meal again.  I came  close to enjoying it, so I want to try again without dramatically wilted sorrel and non-crispy chickpeas.  I don’t know if it will go into permanent rotation, but it’s worth trying once more.

The second recipe, Roasted Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Harissa, had me roast chickpeas for 18 minutes at 425 degrees.  These chickpeas were close to crispy, unlike the previous “crispy” chickpeas.  They probably could have used another five minutes in the oven, but I didn’t want to risk the carrots.  What’s with the inconsistent times?  I don’t think the oven’s 25-degree difference should result in a 50% longer cooking time.  (But I need to research that, maybe one of those tables in Modernist Cuisine?)

So — carrots.  Another vegetable I don’t like.  These baby carrots were pretty, in a nice range of colors.  Based on appearance I talked myself into downing a mouthful.  AND THEY WERE AMAZING.  The dressing (cumin, lime, olive oil and pepper) delivered a hint of sweetness.  There was something almost apple pie-like about these carrots.

The chickpeas weren’t bad, either.  I tried to get chickpea, quinoa, and feta cheese in each bite. The combination helped enormously.  It still surprises me, a Picky Child Eater, that food is often better combined in one mouthful.  I grew up wanting everything separated, like on a cafeteria plate.  Heaven help my poor parents if the corn contaminated the fried fish.  The chickpeas once again could have been crispier, but the quinoa and feta cheese saved the day.

This meal is also a win.  I’m looking forward to cooking it again.

The week’s third meal, Trout Teriyaki with Salad and Carrot-Ginger Dressing, was a failure. The trout was excellent, but the carrot dressing was a total miss.  The recipe editing was not up to Plated’s usual standards.  The recipe wanted me to pour hoisin and teriyaki sauces over the dish.  Sauces, plural.  In bold type, while the “and” was not bolded — hoisin and teriyaki sauces.  I wasted five minutes hunting for the hoisin sauce before realizing the bottle I had dumped all over the fish contained hoisin and teriyaki sauce (singular).

The Mistake of the Evening went to the carrot-ginger dressing, which Plated raves is “a star of this dish whether you leave it chunky for more texture or blend it until smooth.” Due to poor recipe editing I ended up with overpowering carrot sludge.  The ingredients list called for 1.5 ounces of carrot. In retrospect I realized my carrot was much larger than 1.5 ounces, but I’ve become accustomed to pre-measured ingredients in these subscription boxes, so I forgot to pull out a scale and check. The recipe should have reminded me.  After all, it told me to mince 1/2 a shallot and reserve the remainder. A similar carrot warning might have saved this dish.  The lack of warning lead to a vertebral ocean of carrot sludge, overpowering all the other ingredients in the dressing.  I ended up with two cups of carrot sludge.

Still, two out of three successes! I’m happy.  I feel like I’m making real changes to my eating habits.

Photoshopped awkwardness

This photo, from the recipe card for Home Chef’s Spaghetti Alla Rustica, cracks me up.  Was the art director on vacation or something?  For extra mirth check out the sad fake shadows underneath the ginormous leaves, and don’t forget to shake your head while chuckling at the oh-so-Photoshopped-in basil garnish.

I love Home Chef, really, but how can you not laugh?  This is worthy of some of the snafus I’ve seen on McDonald’s marketing materials.

The food, you ask?  Fan-freaking-tastic.  I’ve never eaten much spaghetti.  In my parent’s house it was always served with spaghetti sauce mixed with ground beef, which looked unpalatable. I wasn’t sure about this vegetarian version, but I’m glad I talked myself into it.  The sauce is tangy and fresh and warm and cheesy . . . it’s a heavy, carb-loaded meal (pasta, right?) but it didn’t taste heavy.

The portions are huge, easily three or possibly four small portions instead of the promised two.  I took some to work for lunch, and still had leftovers in the fridge.

I’ve bought all the ingredients for another round, and now I’m waiting for an evening in need of comfort food.  My leftover plan is to only cook 1/3 of the spaghetti, but an entire batch of sauce. The sauce will go to the freezer.  It’s delicious, I’m sure I’ll find a good way to use it.

I wonder how it would taste on a pizza?  Have to think about this.

Eating subscription box meals, exposing myself to foods and methods I’d never explored, which often means I have to buy new kitchen equipment. For example, I didn’t own a basting brush until recently. Instead I’ve been surviving with an almost new carefully-cleaned paintbrush, but when I needed it for paint again an Amazon order became mandatory.

Usually I can get away without special equipment the first time I cook a meal, but if I like it enough to make it part of my recipe collection then I’ll buy equipment to help me cook faster and more efficiently.

Next week’s box from Home Chef is an exception. They’re sending me Mango-Lime BBQ Tofu Kebabs.

My mouth started watering while reading the recipe. All that lime, and sriracha, and grilled . . . wait . . . grill? Like, an outdoor grill? I don’t have one of those. I don’t really want one, either. I’ve grilled before, and I don’t like standing over hot coals in 100+ degree Texas heat, getting a face full of smoke. I’ll eat grilled, thank you VERY much, but I don’t want to actually grill.

I also don’t want to buy, maintain or clean a grill, or constantly buy charcoal or propane or whatever it is grills run on.

Research was clearly in order! After reading a few articles on indoor grilling (my favorite was from Epicurious) I purchased a Lodge Cast Iron Single-Burner Reversible Grill/Griddle, a cleaning tool, and a smoked olive oil sample set from The Smoked Olive. My pantry already contains an unopened container of smoked salt, courtesy of a TJ Maxx impulse buy.

I can’t wait for the equipment and the subscription box to arrive. This will be fun!